TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GOVERNMENT, THE LORDS, AND THE COUNTRY.
UNLESS the Government are careful, their treat- ment of the House of Lords question will end in a paradox, and a paradox is a foundation upon which nothing ever has been or ever can be built. If we examine Sir Henry Campbell-Baunerman's speech in the Commons on Tuesday, it will be seen that what he really asks for is a House of Lords which will not oppose the will of a Liberal Government,—that is, of the majority of the House of Commons who choose, and keep in power, a Liberal Ministry. In a word, he asks for a House of Lords which shall be as subservient to the will of a Liberal Government as, most unfortunately, they are subservient to the will of a Unionist Government. No doubt Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman does not put the matter so crudely as this. He tells us, indeed, that what is wanted is a House of Lords that will not oppose the will of the country. This, however, does not really carry us very far, for the House of Lords are, and always have been, perfectly willing to admit that they must yield to the will of the country. The only matter in dispute is : how is the will of the country to be ascertained ? The majority in the House of Commons argue that the way to obey the will of the country is to obey them; but the Lords, supported, as we cannot help thinking, by the feeling of the nation as a whole, will not agree that the majority in the House of Commons must always and in all circumstances reflect the wishes of the nation. In effect, the House of Lords only claim the light to amend or to reject the legislation sent to them by the Commons when they are not convinced that the country has definitely made up its mind in regard to a
• particular measure. For example, they profess to have been justified in passing the Trade Disputes Bill, though the majority of their members did not approve of that Bill, because they believed it to be the will of the country. On the other hand, they justify their action in maintaining their amendments to the Education Bill on the ground that here the action of the House of Commons was not consistent with the will of the people.
How is this conflict to be decided ? Who is to say which body has better diagnosed the will of the master ? If the House of Commons would agree to the plan which we have advocated for the last ten or fifteen years, and take a poll of the people on the point in dispute, there would be no difficulty. When the House of Lords reject a measure which the House of Commons believe to be endorsed by popular approval, that measure should be referred to the electors,—that is, a Referendum should be taken upon it, as is done in Switzerland. The nation itself would thus decide between its hereditary and its elected servants. The machinery for such a process would be quite simple. The House of Commons having determined to adhere to their Bill, the Bill as it finally left the Commons would be passed by the Lords with the addition of a clause like the following :—"This Bill shall not come into operation till a poll of the people has been taken thereon, and a majority of votes has been given to the effect that this Bill shall be law on and after January let, 19—." Such a system would, in our opinion, prove the best possible check on dangerous and subversive action by a House of Commons. It would prevent a Parliament chosen, as was the present Parliament, to save the country from the imminent danger of a recourse to Protection, and the consequent destruction of the system upon which our commercial and fiscal prosperity rests, from undermining the strength of the nation by Socialistic legislation, from dissolving or weakening the Legislative Union with 'Ireland, or from impairing our defensive forces. Again, it might allow the nation to make use of a certain set of admlinistratora of experience and ability, even though it did not approve of a good many of the legislative schemes to which those adminis- trators happened to be pledged. But enormous as, in our opinion, would be the advantages of adopting the Referendum as the means of settling disputes between the two Houses, we fear that, for the present at any rate, it is hopeless to expect the adoption of such a reform. The Liberal Party is strangely prejudiced against the Referendum. No doubt such a prejudice is a sign of weakness, and indicates that the Liberal majority in the Commons is not altogether sincere when it declares that it, and it alone, knows what is the will of the nation. If it felt sure that it did represent the desires of the electors, it would have no fear of putting the matter to the test of a poll of the people. Still, the fact remains, and must be taken into account, that the Liberal Party will have nothing to say to the Referendum. It may perhaps trust the people a good way in the abstract, but apparently not quite so far as that in the concrete.
Is there no other way of solving the problem ? If the House of Commons are unwilling to admit—and from many points of view we can understand and sympathise with' that unwillingness—that the House of Lora have a right to judge what is and what is not desired by the people, would they be willing to substitute for the hereditary House a House popularly elected, and therefore without the democratic disabilities from which the Peers suffer? For ourselves, we believe that an admirable revising Chamber might be chosen on as democratic a basis as that of the House of Commons, and might prove a most efficient check on legislation. We should like to see the United Kingdom divided into some twenty great constituencies, with about two million. inhabitants each, and each constituency given the right to elect ten Members, and to elect those ten Members by a minority vote,—that is, by a vote which would not secure the whole of the ten representatives to the party which had a majority of a few hundreds in the constituency, but would, if the Liberals were, say, six-tenths of the con- stituency, give them six Members, and the Unionists, being four-tenths of the constituency, four Members. Legisla- tion which had secured first the approval of the House of Commons, and then of this powerful and democratic Senatorial body, could certainly not be challenged as contrary to the will of the people. If, however, we are asked, as practical politicians, whether there is the slightest chance of the House of Commons being willing to establish such a democratic Second Chamber, we are bound to admit that we see none whatever. To create such a body as we have indicated must mean the depriving of the House of Commons of &considerable portion of their present power. As the late Lord Salisbury once said, there is only a fixed amount of power in any institution such as a Parliament, and if increased power is given to one House, it is absolutely necessary that it must be taken away from the other. But, short of a revolution, no elective Assembly will ever willingly yield up any part of its authority, and therefore we fear we must dismiss the notion of the House of Commons willingly assenting to the establishment of a genuinely democratic Second House.
Is there yet another way of providing a solution of a deadlock between the Lords and the Commons ? There is, and it is one which we think well worth discussion. It is a method adopted in several Continental Constitutions. Under it, when the Houses cannot agree in any other way, they sit together and vote as one body. We may say at once that it would not be possible to make such a suggestion in regard to the House of Lords as at present constituted. Their membership is too large and too casual to make it reasonable to ask the House of Commons to assent to such a proposal. Suppose, however, that the House of Lords were reduced in numbers to, say, two hundred Members, that the membership of the reformed body could be confined to men of undoubted distinction and political experience, and suppose, also, that the reformed body could be remodelled so as not to contain, as now, a vastly preponderating majority of one party in the State. In that case might not the Rouse of Commons, with their membership approaching seven hundred, be willing at a Constitutional crisis to sit with the House of Lords and decide the matter by a common vote? A strong Liberal majority, strengthened by the addition of the Liberal minority in the Second Chamber, need have little fear of being swamped. How is such a reformed and diminished House of Lords to be attained ? We believe it can be attained, and satisfactorily attained, by adopting the " principles to be found in the Bill which Lord Newton is introducing into the House of Lords,—a Bill which, it is understood, follows in its main provisions certain suggestions made by us in an article which appeared in the Speeta,tor of December 15th last. Needless to say, neither Lord Newton nor any of those who support him imagine that the House of Lords will be allowed to settle this question by themselves. The Bill is merely introduced with the object of creating discussion in Parliament and in the country.
Pending the printing of Lord Newton's Bill, we max again lay down shortly some of the principles upon which it seems to us that a Lords' House of two hundred Members of distinction and experience might be established. In the first place, we would enact that no Peer should be a Member of the Upper House merely on an hereditary qualification and because he was the son of his father. Only those Peers should have membership who had proved their ability in one of a variety of ways, and had shown themselves to be capable citizens and servants of the State. We would give membership of the Upper House to any Peer who had held high office under the Crown,— that is, who had been in the Cabinet or a member of the Administration ; had served as a Viceroy, Governor- General, or Ambassador ; had attained high rank in the Navy, the Army, or the Civil Service; or had been on the Judicial Bench. Next, we would include any Peer who had been sworn to the Privy Council. In addition, any Peer should have a seat who before succeeding to a peerage had been twice elected to Parliament. Any Peer who had served the office of Chairman of a County Council or Mayor of a borough with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants for any period exceeding four years should have a right to sit. Any man who had been created a Peer should also sit, and we would further confer on the Crown the right of creating a limited number of life-Peers. Finally, we would give the Peers of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom not entitled as above to sit in the Upper House the right of electing to the Upper House, by a minority vote, a number not greater than a quarter of their total number. It is difficult to calculate offhand what would be the exact number of such a Chamber ; but we do not think that it would far exceed two hundred. Unless the right of the Crown to make life-Peers, to swear Peers to the Privy Council, and to give offices of importance to Peers were to be unduly restricted, it would not, however, be possible to limit exactly the number of the House of Lords. At the same time, the House of Commons would naturally and reasonably refuse to Bit in joint Session with an indeterminate number of representatives from the Peers' House. This difficulty might perhaps be got over by enacting that in a case where a disagreement between the two Houses was to be settled by a joint Session and a joint vote, the reformed House of Peers should send to the joint Session two hundred Members chosen from their body, againby a minority vote.
We are quite prepared to be told in certain quarters that the scheme we have described is preposterous, and that the House of Commons will not look at it. In that case, of course, it must fall to the ground, for no one deems it possible to force upon the House of Commons or the Liberal Party a scheme which they dislike. Nevertheless, we are bound to point out to the latter that they cannot have it both ways,—that is, they cannot both reform the House of Lords and reduce their powers to nothing. Talk about the complete abolition of the veto of the Lords as a solution is an absurdity, for if the veto is completely abolished, the House of Lords is in reality abolished also, and we should be face to face with an omnipotent House of Commons. But, in our opinion, nothing is further from the will of the nation than to endow the House of Commons with omnipotence. The Commons may not be unpopular, but for all that the electors are not going to give them a blank cheque.
We may return for a moment to the paradox of which we spoke at the beginning of this article. The real grievance—and it is a grievance the strength of which we fully acknowledge—against the House of Lords is that they are inclined, not to take an independent view in politics, but to obey the behests of the leader of the Conservative Party in the Commons. But while protesting against this, the Liberals are at this moment in effect demanding that what the Lords ought to do is to obey the behests of the leader of the Liberal Party. What is really wanted is a House of Lords which will be subservient to no party, but which will judge all measures independently and upon their merits, and whose one and only defence
for legislative action will be : "We believed that the course we took was the right course. That is, We acted according to our consciences." That a House of Lords reformed on the lines we have suggested above would be more independent is our belief. But if we possessed a body strong enough to take so high a line as this—a line, remember, not adopted by the House of Lords during the past two generations—there must be some method of avoiding a Constitutional deadlock. If the House of Commons are unwilling to find that solution in a Referendum or poll of the people, why should they not find it in a joint Session and joint vote with a reduced and reformed House of Lords ?
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